From AP. "WASHINGTON (AP) — With website woes ongoing, the Obama administration Monday granted a six-week extension until March 31 for Americans to sign up for coverage next year and avoid new tax penalties under the president's health care overhaul law."

And the Republicans were evil for wanting to do this in a LEGAL manner. By legislation, duly passed and signed into law. The unilateral delay of implementation of the law by POTUS is unconstitutional. Article II section 3, he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed. Not delayed, not postponed, no waivers for favored groups, he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

As for lies told about coverage? First article on impeachment against Nixon- "He lied to the American people."

@pm317 He also didn't know what those IRS peons in Omaha were doing to the Tea Party. And he didn't know there was no such thing as a shovel read job. Obama could fill a 3rd autobiography with things he didn't know.

Yes, but the good news (if there is any) is that this is NBC breaking this, not Fox. The lefties will sputter and make sexist comments about Lisa Myers (the reporter) but the dam is starting to break. Last night CBS, today NBC. I'm guessing there are more than a few government employees determined not to be tossed under the bus by Obama and friends.

So all those perfect insurance customers- those who are healthy and had been paying those premiums year after year just to be safe, because you can't easily become insured with a pre-existing condition. Millions of these people are now being dumped all at once because their policies don't conform to the mandates. So they look into the new policies and they're now being forced to buy more insurance than they had before, at a cost substantially more expensive than before. But they won't be penalized if they don't purchase because they are pushing back the penalty. And they can now just wait to buy insurance until you get sick.

Could this thing have created any more incentive not to buy insurance?

Right now it's just people who self insure, over all a small minority. Will the same thing happen when the wavers are lifted on employer provided health insurance? If so, that's when it's really going to hit the fan.

What's the difference between a cancellation and a 40% premium increase? That's what we got in this house, along with a reduction in coverage except for things we don't need.

Three weeks ago I wrote my congressman (D),the state's two senators (Ds) and the governor (D) and asked them if they thought our premium increase was a reduction in health care costs. I have heard nothing and they are usually pretty prompt about sending me boilerplate - or BS as AA calls it.

This also goes to the know-nothing president. He must spend the day reading the papers to find out what's going on in his admin.

Recommend Bret Stephens column in Tuesday's WSJ for a great summary of know-nothingness.

Yep.. this lying business.. we (Hillary supporters), noticed it in Dem Primary 2008 and we were stunned when he was allowed to do it with impunity, with media lapdogs doing nothing about it, nothing.. many a TV was perhaps damaged because of things thrown at it then due to this bizarre phenomenon.

Spouse has a self-employed cousin. Cousin was advised by her health insurance company that effective 12/31/12, her policy is cancelled. She was satisfied with her soon to expire health insurance coverage. She must now scramble to get coverage by year's end.

The White House Press corpse should be asking: "Does the President now know that people cannot keep their plans and when did he find out?" "Does the President know that there are deeper problems in Obamacare IT than website lock-ups? When did he find out?" "Does the President know that he is authorizing drone strikes? When did he find out?"

For years medical device manufacturers have used fear and intimidation, in effect using the lives of those people who need the products these Capitalistic, devilish advocates produce, to use loopholes-and it seems often times like quasi-evasive actions-to not pay their fair share.

Well now, with Obamacare, those folks are gonna find out that paying a little more, only about 2% more to be precise, isn't that bad.

Maybe they will even find out contributing to what we all built for them, the infrastructure our POTUS has presided over, feels pretty good and in line with the Christian faith many claim to feel.

Those who had their insurance canceled had bad plans. I suspect most were too stupid to know. Have you driven next to these people? Been to a casino and seen their fat, slobby hands throwing away their money into a well-lit and noisy machine? Been to a poor area's grocery store and seen them shoving ice cream or burritos in their fat faces while shopping?

Of course these idiots don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to healthcare (or insurance).

Obamacare will provide them, each and every one of them, with good plans. Sometimes the prices will vary, we are talking about a lot of people here after all.

The reason the delay was provided to employers was because most of those employees affected would pay less and be so damn happy Obama felt it would be unfair to Republicans in 2014.

Obama is a sporting man with decency so pure Rethugs can't even seen him.

I'm pretty sure the President did not, in fact "know" that he was lying. I'm sure no one told him, and he never asked -- he is not exactly a detail guy.

Re: Inga's link -- there's a lot of bald and unsupported assertions in there. Given the kind of premium increases that are being reported in the press, it seems unlikely that the subsidies will actually result in a majority of individuals paying less -- people down by the poverty level will pay less, but up towards the top end (near the middle of the income distribution) probably won't. And people who have lost employer coverage because of Obamacare are probably going to get stuck paying a lot more in the individual market, since their premiums now need to subsidise medical expenses for the uninsurable and the desperately ill.

Really, although the propaganda all touts how the new plans cover 60% or 70% of all average expected medical costs, that "average" is assessed on a population which is expected to include a lot of people with monster medical expenses, as a result of which the average person is likely to face a situation in which their health insurance barely covers anything at all -- their premium is being siphoned off to pay for health care for people who face huge medical expenses. My understanding is that this is why, in addition to the premium rate shock, a lot of people have been horrified at how high their deductibles have gone. "Comprehensive benefits" (that people didn't want to pay for before, mind) and limits on out of pocket don't really matter that much in that kind of situation.

That said, expanding Medicaid -- the only successful coverage expansion so far -- does give people more health insurance at lower cost. So there's one success, I suppose.

Quote for the New Republic article: "Obamacare also has subsidies that offset premium increases for the majority of Americans. The value of the tax credits, which are financed by higher taxes on the wealthy and various cuts to government health care spending, varies depending on the incomes of the people receiving them."

that was then.. precisely because of Benghazi, I have lost interest in any of her future bids.. yep, at one time as in 2008, I used to think Democrats were good and Republicans were evil..Democratic primary in 2008 was an eye opener -- some of us know more about Obama shenanigans than you republicans and waited and waited that it would all be exposed. Hillary would have been a better president.

My sister and her husband are small business owners in the middle of trying to grow their business. Their premiums went up 5000.00 a year, the deductible for a family of four went from 5000 to 12,500. Their insurance company, blue cross, told them there are now ten things mandated to be included in every policy.

The one and only thing that could have helped wasn't included, prescription drug coverage. Thankfully my bro in law can now get maternity care and nursing supplies.

This reminds me of how "60 Minutes" proved that cigarette companies knew cigarettes were addictive and carcinogenic. Everyone with common sense knew (a) that cigarettes were addictive and carcinogenic and (b) that cigarette companies knew that too.

Village idiot does not understand. Hillary had a better healthcare plan on her 08 platform and she would have been orders of magnitude more competent in implementing it. She had better ideas on fixing the economy and housing crisis too. You seem to be one of those fucking idiots who didn't understand any of that.

I wonder if any of the democrats are thinking of an "exit strategy" at this point? ACA can not survive with only democrat support. I don't expect "the fever to break" in this decade, that's wishful thinking. So what do they do?

"For the vast majority of Americans, very little is changing. Most Americans get insurance either through Medicare, Medicaid, or an employer. The Affordable Care Act isn’t doing much to alter premiums or out-of-pockets of these plans, at least for the time being. The big changes are mostly taking place in the “non-group” market—that is, for individuals who buy coverage on their own rather than through an employer."

The big difference between Obama and Clinton II on healthcare probably wouldn't have been on the overall outline of the plan. He just copied hers, after all, and added back the mandate he had so criticized as a candidate because the plan he actually campaigned on was idiotic and obviously unworkable. The difference would have been that she actually cares about healthcare policy, so she wouldn't have half-assed it the way Obama did.

On the positive side for Republicans, that would have made it easier to stop her up front, because she wouldn't have been content to just get anything through, just to have a talking point, the way Obama was.

On the negative side for Republicans, she wouldn't have screwed up implementation the way the total incompetents in the White House and HHS have done.

All told, though, while I still think Clinton would have been a far, far better president than Obama has been (and seems likely to be for the remainder of his Presidency), my admiration for her has been pretty well shaken by her sorry performance on Benghazi.

From Inga's link: "One of Obamacare’s primary goals is to make sure everybody has a decent health insurance policy .... Starting next year, insurers can’t sell new policies unless they meet Obamacare’s standards."

This is my biggest objection to ObamaCare. Who in the hell are you to make this decision for me? If I want a catastrophic care policy (you know, real INSURANCE) who are you to say otherwise? If you were wiser than me, I might acquiesce, but you are not.

Of course I fully expect this to be rejected, it makes far too much sense for most rightists.

Regarding point number one in your link. Now we know why the dems wanted to have the employer mandate.So they can delay the pain till after the election. Because once the mandate hits the same thing will occur with with insurance you get from your company.

Inga - we are a small business and purchase our health care from Kaiser. (love it by the way). Previously, we purchased our family's policy from Blue Cross. One way we were able to reduce our premium was to get a policy without maternity coverage. I didn't need it as we weren't having any more children.

Under ACA, all policies have to provide this. How is this not stupid? I recently read about a 61 year old, single man, who will see his premiums skyrocket so that, in part, he can have maternity coverage.

"One spot of good news in the census data released Wednesday was on the health-care front: For the first time in three years, the share of Americans without health insurance declined, with the number of uninsured dropping by 1.3 million people from 2010 to 2011. A major factor was an influx of newly insured young adults, many of whom benefitted from a provision in the 2010 health-care law requiring insurers to let parents keep adult children on their plans up to age 26 (Aizenman, 9/12)."

Julie, I agree that is stupid. One of the things that certainly should be fixed. If I had my way it would be repealed and replaced with Single Payer. I hate the idea that insurance companies are central to Obamacare. Same as Medicare Part D, a wet kiss to insurance companies.

Obama also lied when he said "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

The Obamacare health plans do not allow the patient to go to the better (probably more expensive) hospitals. These Obamacare plans do not include your doctor if your doctor is a third tier specialist.

Mickey Kaus has been pointing this out for months. Any plan he can buy on the Exchange does not allow him to go to a physician at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and that is where his doctors practice.

A lot of president have one lie that defines their presidency, or one perceived lie. Bush I had his "read my lips, no new taxes" Bush II has Iraq (even though the idea that its based on a lie is merely a democratic talking point).And Clinto of course had his "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" speech.

But Obama has like five lies just on health care alone. A lie where you can make a commercial of him saying the lie and then just shake your head at how bald faced it is. No further commentary needed.

And that's just on health care! pretty much any talking point for Obama is based on a lie, from Guantanamo, to Drone strikes to raising the debt ceiling.

The biggest liar as president in modern times? Certainly in terms of quantity.

Under ACA, all policies have to provide this. How is this not stupid? I recently read about a 61 year old, single man, who will see his premiums skyrocket so that, in part, he can have maternity coverage.

Who else is going to pay for Julia's prenatal care, maternity, and pediatric care? According to Pelosi, we ain't seen nothing yet on that front.

The biggest liar as president in modern times? Certainly in terms of quantity.

You, I and many others can only hope that the 60 Minutes story and the topic at hand will convince a few more that the man's credibility took a hit. Too quote the real Lincoln and not the wannabe one from Hawaii:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

I love how Obama added the word "period" to the end of his declarations. To emphatically show at he was telling the honest to goodness truth. It was like bush saying "read my lips". And he said it many times exactly that way.

"You will be able to keep your insurance. PERIOD."

That's his tell. The more emphatic he is the more you can tell that he's lying through his teeth.The mark of a true sociopath.

If you think many are being dropped from their coverage now, just wait until 2014. That's when corporations will start taking full advantage of the Obamacare incentive to drop employee coverage. Much cheaper to pay a small fine than purchase insurance for their workers. The good news is, much of this will occur right before the 2014 elections.

Martha wrote:"mickey Kaus has been pointing this out for months. Any plan he can buy on the Exchange does not allow him to go to a physician at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and that is where his doctors practice."

so then these plans are all HMO plans. Which suck! I went through this nightmare when working as a consultant. I ended up buying an HMO plan for a few months. And it covered nothing. And I lost access to my doctors. And anytime I went to any specialist I had to get a referral. And could only o to people in network. And the deductible was ridiculous. I got off that plan as soon as I could.I'm sure that because I won't receive a subsidy that if I were to buy insurance through the exchange it would be a lot more than when I bought it prior to the exchange. For terrible insurance.

Inga wrote:Julie, I agree that is stupid. One of the things that certainly should be fixed. If I had my way it would be repealed and replaced with Single Payer.

We already have single payer for many. Medicaid. And its insolvent already. Adding millions more to the rolls will only make it worse.Also, govt doesn't reimburse doctors properly for their Medicaid patients, so doctors lose money the more Medicaid patients they see. And what's happening is more doctors do not take on Medicaid patients meaning less access to doctors for people on Medicaid. Obamacare will not sell a lot of plans, but it will drive a lot of people onto Medicaid.

Leit Bart: while that Jarrett quote is mildly disturbing, did you read that piece at NRO which quotes her:

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

That's because Medicare wasn't designed and implemented by idiots. It has a very simple, very classic, business model:

(1) Force all workers to pay tax(2) Use tax proceeds to pay for beneficiaries' health costs

It doesn't rely on a complex bank shot of every single thing going exactly right for it not to collapse catastrophically. Even today, although it's headed for disaster, disaster is still over a decade away.

On a per capita basis, the funds we expend annually on Medicare and Medicaid would be sufficient to provide basic coverage for every citizen if the government were as stingy with benefits as the governments of Japan or Singapore (which have some of the best health outcomes in the world). This might not be true anymore (as Japan has continued to age), but back in 2008, we were spending more, per capita, on Medicare and Medicaid than the Japanese spent per capita on all health care consumption.

If it didn't require a tax increase, I'd be fine with converting all our medicare/medicaid revenues into a barebones backstop basic coverage system.

That's never going to happen, though, because (a) it does nothing to address the pricing problems in the health services industry, (b) cutting the health coverage of every Medicare beneficiary in the country would be political suicide, and (c) cutting the reimbursement rates to the health services industry would be political suicide.

Not going to happen. Any attempt to introduce universal medical coverage in the US is going to end up like Obamacare, in which every special interest (patient and provider) gets its preferred medical treatment labelled "essential," and the cost of coverage skyrockets as a result.

Given the total mess Obamacare has made of our current system, I'm not sure what I would do now. There's millions of people who have already been screwed over by the Obamacare fiasco, and figuring out something to help them is beyond me.

What I would have said before, though, is that I think the most important thing is to get control of costs, and the best way to get a start on that is to encourage price competition.

1. Mandate price disclosures throughout the entire medical industry. No arrangements prohibiting disclosure of prices to end-consumers of medical services.

2. Encourage cash purchases of health care with tax incentives (e.g. make them deductible). The more people who are purchasing medical services directly, with cash, the more price pressure there will be.

3. Encourage direct participation in the individual health insurance market by making individual purchases of private health care more advantageous than letting your employer buy it for you.

4. Encourage HSA's to enable more people to pay for health services directly with cash.

Input constraints also increase costs in the medical arena. To address these:

5. Subsidize medical education (we do this already actually)

6. Encourage professional licensing regimes which push more work and more responsibility to non-doctor medical professionals.

Other than (1) and (6), I don't think these would be likely to encounter huge political resistance.

To handle huge medical expenses, I have mulled over the possibility of a government programme that -- at the point of incurring the expense -- the patient could decide to opt in or opt out. If they opt in, the government picks up the tab (up to some cap), but 10% of their income is garnished, not dischargeable in bankruptcy, until the debt is repaid (or the debtor dies). This might be impractical, though compared to Obamacare it seems like it would be a walk in the park.

Pm137 has it not occurred to you that ObamaCare is the Son Of HillaryCare?

As for single payer apparently no one has noticed that Johnny Roberts and the Supremes already ruled ruled in the ACA case that Congress can't mandate that the states expand Medicaid ( notice that 36 states don't have state exchanges and can't be coerced to do so) and that Congress can't mandate insurance purchases and therefore by logical extension can't mandate that providers must accept single payer. The court ruled that the ACA is only permissible as a tax and nothing more. And as it is written on every dolar bill-good for all debts public and private Congress won't be able to stop fee for service and force single payer. Pretty soon the IRS is going to have to rule on the deductibity of the premium-tax. That is going to be very interesting.

Balfegor medical expenses are already tax deductible for the portion that is over 7.5% of AGI. As for cash payments reducing prices when most privately insured have high deductibles people will be motivated to haggle prices especially if doctors start demanding cash upfront payments in order to avoid getting stiffed by those with high deductibles.

Does anyone else understand that the wonderful health care plans in places like Singapore and Germany that Inga is so fond of work because the US subsidizes drug research/development costs for the rest of the world? And that they also work well because they're covering MUCH LESS than 330 million people?

Inga-bot response:Humperdink, you idiot, King Obama has already ordered his throne carried down to the ocean and demanded the laws of supply and demand not get his socialist feet wet. Do not speak again of these so-called laws when by simple executive order King Obama has overcome them!Pfft!Monopolies are good, effective, fair, awesome and not at all wasteful.BOHICA!

From Inga's link: "The Affordable Care Act isn’t doing much to alter premiums or out-of-pockets of these plans, at least for the time being. The big changes are mostly taking place in the “non-group” market—that is, for individuals who buy coverage on their own rather than through an employer."

Flat out wrong. Thousands of people are losing their coverage entirely. Remember when a law harming so much as one person was an abomination?

Inga, don't you realize that the only entity that can't pay for the cost of health care is the government? Hundreds of millions of regular Americans are perfectly willing to spend their hard earned money for what they percieve as the advantages of health care rather than, say, a trip to France or Egypt.

The federal government has grossly overpromised with Medicare and Medicaid and is going broke. Most states overpromised as well and the worst offenders are starting to go broke.

Stop with the "we" crap and admit that the problem is caused by and owned by the government and not the people who take care of themselves. We're happy to pay more for great health care.

Quit responding to Inga, who simply splats talking points and links to crappy mags like the New Republic. You are all writing some great stuff in your responses, but she doesn't care. She has her fancy house on a lake and the impact on regular folks is meaningless to her.

wow, you think? Why go through all this garbage when Obama could have expanded existing programs that already are supposed to help people who don't have money.instead he decided to tinker with the insurance market on the idea that doing so would help those people. It won't.

But here's the problem with expanding Medicare/Medicaid. Is already insolvent. Adding more people to it will only make it more so. Govt already isn't reimbursing doctors. Adding millions more to it where they continue to not adequately deal with paying doctors will only exacerbate that problem. If something is collapsing putting more weight on it usually makes it collapse faster. For Medicaid to work you'd ultimately need govt to actually reimburse doctors. And if they did that the costs would skyrocket exponentially.Libs want some thing for nothing with Medicaid. They want it as a system but don't want to pay for it. But, you can't call it good or even workable if you ignore how its not being paid for. Look at the amount we pay, in our budget every year into Medicaid alone. And yet govt can't reimburse doctors?

Imagine then if all of health care was like Medicaid. Would govt still not reimburse doctors? As bad as Medicaid is, it would be exponentially worse if that was what all health care looked like.

I agree with you. But Inga really, really needs the attention. I suspected as much but it was brought home to me a day or so ago. She made a comment, and not receiving a reply, later commented again more or less demanding that someone respond to her.

She's sort of the Shouting Thomas of the left. We don't know why she needs the attention, but she's sure out to get it.

@ Balfegor "All told, though, while I still think Clinton would have been a far, far better president than Obama has been (and seems likely to be for the remainder of his Presidency), my admiration for her has been pretty well shaken by her sorry performance on Benghazi" Well, better than Obama has turned out to be a really low bar. Even Slow Joe could have pulled that off. But, while I initially thought she would have been at least more competent, she ran a messy campaign, and her performance managing State was abysmal.

"with the job the government is doing on implementation, I don't see why we'd ever want to trust them with any of healthcare."

Hope you don't mind me improving it for you. :-)

Balfegor,

Things were messed up before primarily by unwise government regulation, and O'Care messes it up muchmore by doubling-down--or actually more like quintupling-down--on that sort of regulatory overreach.

Best thing to do now is to realize that the micro-management and overregulation is a huge part of the problem and to scale that back as much as possible. Here in WA, for example, our plans our more expensive because they have to cover a very long list of things, many of which I'd gladly do without in exchange for a lower premium.

Government regulation of health INSURANCE is why is is so expensive. Each state mandates different levels of coverage- that must be covered. In NY, that includes in-patient substance abuse treatment. I'd drop that in a heatbeat. Along with quack- chiropractic- coverage, which is on my policy. And a whole host of other items.

As for health CARE- one of the big drivers in cost increase is lawsuits. In return for lower prices, I'd be perfectly willing to sign away my rights to sue my doctors.

Of course I fully expect this to be rejected, it makes far too much sense for most rightists"

Inga, child.... Back when you still trusted Obama whyen was lying his ass off with "if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance", we were already debating how Obamacare would be NOT working. You are a tad late to the party. Obamacare and its flat insurance rate are unsustainable, because it is a system with positive feedback. In other words, the more expensive it gets, the more young healthy people get out of it, and the more expensive it gets. Your silly guys from TNR still cannot figure out simplest math. And it's true, math is too difficult for leftists, which is why Obama can barely do 7th grade math.

Last but not least - Obama promised that premiums will go down by 3000%, and geniuses like you applauded him. Do you have any suspicions now that he was wrong?